What Next Flying Cars

November 15, 1987

Twenty years ago, E.O. Pearson, then a NASA engineer, was stranded at National Airport near Washington, D.C., because bad weather prevented him from going aloft in the plane he had flown to the airport. If there had only been a way to drive the plane on the highway, Pearson thought, he could have been on time to his next appointment.

Now Pearson, retired and living in Fort Lauderdale, is following up on that fantasy. Pearson labors six days a week at a South Florida hangar, hoping to create the world's first commercially successful flying car. The concept isn't new, Pearson says. Cars that can fly have been produced before. But since they didn't perform that well as aircraft -- most were very slow -- they never took off commercially. Pearson's invention will be designed to perform like a bona fide airplane, with a 35-foot wingspan and a cruising speed of 240 mph in the air. The wings will either fold back or be removable when the plane is used as a car, he says.

Pearson, who has already built a plywood prototype of the craft, hopes his invention will be in production in about four years. He says it will make only 20 mph on the road. This will make it less than the ideal freeway vehicle, unless the pilot always drives at rush hour, when traffic rarely moves faster than that anyway.